Cioran - Fractures

 WHEN ONE HAS EMERGED from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.

To glimpse the essential, no need to ply a trade. Stay fiat on your back all day long, and moan. . . .

Whatever puts me at odds with the world is consubstantial with myself. How little I have learned from experience. My disappointments have always preceded me.

There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity — that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truths and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker’s disgrace, is the living man’s revenge.

It is not the violent evils that mark us but the secret, insistent tolerable ones belonging to our daily round and undermining us as conscientiously as Time itself.

After a quarter of an hour, no one can observe another’s despair without impatience.

Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

One can imagine everything, predict everything, save how low one can sink.

What still attaches me to things is a thirst inherited from ancestors who carried the curiosity to exist to the point of ignominy.

How we must have loathed each other in the pestilential darkness of the caves! Easy to understand why the painters who managed to keep body and soul together there had no desire to immortalize the image of their kind — why they preferred the figures of animals.

“Having renounced sanctity . . .”: to think I could have uttered such a thing! I must have an excuse, and I don’t despair of finding it.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

How age simplifies everything! At the library I ask for four books. Two are set in type that is too small; I discard them without even considering their contents. The third, too . . . serious, seems unreadable to me. I carry off the fourth without conviction.

One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.

After an evening in his company, you were exhausted, for the necessity of controlling yourself, of avoiding the slightest allusion likely to wound him — and everything wounded him — ultimately left you depleted, irritated with him and with yourself. You resented having to side with him out of scruples carried to the lowest degree of flattery; you despised yourself for not having exploded instead of letting yourself in for so wearying an exercise in . . . delicacy.

We never say of a dog or a rat that it is mortal. Why is man alone entitled to this privilege? After all, death is not man’s discovery, and it is a sign of fatuity to imagine oneself its unique beneficiary.

As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”

The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.

What is dated in Proust: those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation. As if Saint-Simon had undergone the influence of the Précieuses. No one would read him today.

A letter worthy of the name is written in the wake of admiration or outrage — of exaggeration, in short. We realize why a sensible letter is a stillborn one.

I have known obtuse writers, even stupid ones. On the other hand, the translators I have managed to approach were more intelligent and more interesting than the authors they translated. After all, it takes more reflection to translate than to “create.”

Someone regarded as “extraordinary” by his intimates must not furnish proofs against himself. Let him take care not to leave traces, above all not to write, if he ever hopes to seem what he has been for the happy few.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

“I feel you have come to hate what other people think quite as much as what you think yourself,” she told me straightaway, after a long separation. And just as she was leaving, she produced a Chinese fable to prove that nothing can equal the capacity to forget oneself. She, the most present being, the creature most charged with interior energy, with energy tout court, so closely clamped to her ego, so inconceivably full of herself — by what misunderstanding was she boosting effacement to the point of imagining that she offered a perfect example of it?

Ill-mannered beyond permissible limits, miserly, dirty, insolent, cunning, sensitive to the slightest nuance, shrieking with delight over any excess, any joke, scheming and slanderous — everything in him was charm and repulsion. A swine one regrets.

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.

Lucidity: a permanent martyrdom, an unimaginable tour de force.

Those who want to tell us scandalous confidences count quite cynically on our curiosity to satisfy their need, which is to make a show of secrets. They know perfectly well, at the same time, that we will be too jealous of them to betray them.

Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays, like everything that partakes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.

If I have no taste for Mystery, it is because everything seems inexplicable — because I live on the inexplicable, gorged with it.

X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.

It has been justly observed that a philosophical jargon ages just as rapidly as argot. Why? The first is too artificial; the second, too vital. Two ruinous excesses.

He has been living his last days for months, for years, and speaks of his end in the past tense. A posthumous existence. I am amazed that, eating virtually nothing, he manages to survive: “My body and my soul have taken so much time and so much effort to get together that they can’t succeed in separating.” If he doesn’t have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer “in life.” “I am a snuffed candle” is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, “It would take more than one” was his reply.

After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as to greet them thus?”

To survive a destructive book is no less painful for the reader than for the author.

We must be in a state of receptivity — that is, of physical weakness — for words to touch us, to insinuate themselves into us and there begin a sort of career.

To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an individual or to a people.

Orgasm is a paroxysm; despair, too. One lasts an instant; the other, a lifetime.

She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the unfathomable in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.

Let us be reasonable. No one can see through everything completely. Nor, without universal disillusion, can there be universal knowledge, either.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

Brahms represents “dieMelancholie des Unvermögens.” the melancholy of impotence, according to Nietzsche. This judgment, passed on the brink of the philosopher’s collapse, forever dims its luster.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Those imbecilic people one passes —how have they come to this? And how to imagine such a spectacle in antiquity — in Athens, for example? One moment of acute lucidity among these damned souls, and all illusions collapse.

The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.

Just as the advent of the Crucified One has cut history in two, in the same way this night has severed my life.

Everything seems debased and futile once the music stops. You understand that music can be hated, and one is tempted to identify its absolute status with fraudulence. This is because we must react at any cost against it when we love it too much. No one has realized this danger better than Tolstoy, for he knew that music could do with him as it liked. Hence he began execrating it out of fear of becoming its plaything.

Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.

Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?

To love only the indefinite thought that never reaches words, and the instantaneous thought that lives by words alone: divagation and boutade.

A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.

Nature, in search of a formula likely to content everyone, let her choice fall on deaths which — as was to be expected — has satisfied no one.

Heraclitus has a Delphic side and a textbook side, a mixture of lightning-bolt perceptions and the primer: a man of inspiration and a schoolteacher. A pity he did not drop learnings did not always think outside learning!

I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.

— Yet you go on breathing.

— Yes, I do everything that is done. But . . .

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of his future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.

We always date ourselves by our admirations. As soon as we cite anyone but Homer or Shakespeare, we risk seeming old-fashioned or dotty.

It is just possible to imagine God speaking French. Christ, never. His words do not function in a language so ill at ease in the naive or the sublime.

So long to have questioned ourselves about man! impossible to carry the taste of the morbid further.

Does fury come from God or from the Devil? From both; otherwise, how explain that our rage dreams of galaxies to pulverize and that it is inconsolable at having nothing but this wretched planet within reach?

We go to such lengths — why? To become again what we were before we were.

X, who has failed in everything, complained in my presence of not having a destiny.

— Oh yes, certainly you do. The sequence of your failures is so remarkable that it seems to reveal a providential plan.

Woman mattered as long as she simulated shame, reserve. What inadequacy she reveals by no longer playing the game! Already she is worth nothing, now that she resembles us. Thus vanishes one of the last lies that made existence tolerable.

To love one’s neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?

The only notable events of a life are its rifts. And it is they that are the last to fade from our memory.

When I learned he was quite impermeable to both Dostoyevsky and music, I refused — for all his great virtues — to meet him. I much prefer a slightly backward type, sensitive to one or the other.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

Since day after day I have lived in the company of Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it. What could be healthier, what could be more natural? What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist — a grave flaw, a law par excellence, my flaw.

Anathemas And Admirationsirations

Translated from the French by

 RICHARD HOWARD